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A couple of years ago I started teaching a class about the mind and the brain in a small school near Boston. Before my first day of teaching I came in to meet some of the students. When they heard about the proposed class they were excited. Unprompted one of them launched into an impromptu explanation of the school.  ”The brain is fascinating” she exclaimed, “people really have different types of brains, for example at our school I would say that exactly half the kids are ADD and the other half are OCD.”

That fascinating piece of pop-Neuropsychology really stuck with me. It got me thinking about the types of narratives being circulated in society about the brain and the mind.  After a fair amount of reading it lead me to write a paper about the way kids thought about the relationship between mind and brain as it related to psychopharmaceuticals. I am glad to see topic explored again in  this exploration of folk neuropsychology featured on Mindhacks.

This is one of the best videos out there related to health.

23 and half hours

I think if we take the science seriously, we need to ask how we should restructure schools, offices and medicine in order to allow people to spend several hours a day using their bodies.

Good post from Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex about Obama’s use of personal narrative in the health care debate.

I think research is compelling that we have an easier time dealing with moral issues on a personal level than on a mass level. But will it help?  There is equally compelling evidence that once people have made a moral decision, they are very good at giving post-hoc rationalizations for their moral intuitions.

When I teach students about the brain, I usually start with visual illusions.  After really exploring a illusions it easy to help students reach and understanding that we see with both our brain not just with our eyes.

That’s why I love this study about how vision affects cognition.  The study takes a bunch of snooty, very well trained wine tasters. These guys are paid to write long poetic reviews about the way a wine smells.  As WinePro.org tells us

The nose can sometimes even beat the eyes in the race for setting up the tasting expectations. An aroma can carry from one room to another, beyond the line of sight. Of the five senses, smell is the most acute, approximately 1,000 times more sensitive than the sense of taste. As a result, what is termed flavor is influenced by roughly 75% smell (olfaction) and 25% taste (gustation) in healthy individuals.

To sum up: the nose knows.  Now, apparently there is a very specialized vocabulary regarding the smells (aromas? ) of wine.  The smell of red wines and white wines are often described in different languages.  In fact if you want to sound snooty when describing your wine you can even order a wine aroma wheel and use it to construct sentences like “”Intense aromas of ginger, citrus, candied berry and multigrain bread turn to honey, roasted almonds and graphite on the palate.”  To sum up, the nose of a wine taster, knows more then your nose.

So what happens when researchers used am oderless, tasteless liquid to change the color of white wine red?

It turns out that the experts use the red-wine language to describe the fake red-wine.  All those years of gently quaffing their glasses, inhaling deeply and donning mysterious looks of profound insight, meant little in the face of a couple drops of food coloring.  The information from the eyes, in this case, simply overruled the information from the nose.

It’s just another subtle and amusing case of the brain adjudicating reality for us.